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This is just a cynical, pessimistic, edgy hot take; come on!
It's correct, of course, but you should have kept going until you reached very cynical, very pessimistic, and very edgy. It's too optimistic to imply that the beancounters would at least fund the best projects if only they could figure out what those projects were! As counterexamples, I was just last week treated to multiple separate stories of this form: Researcher A1 working on Project A demonstrated that with a slight modification AA he could make Older Project B obsolete at a fraction of the cost, so researchers B1 through Bn managed to convince their shared superiors that A1 was stepping out of his lane, and either further work into AA got canceled or all of A got canceled for the sin.
I've of course heard the claim that "science advances one funeral at a time", but I'd imagined it only being applicable to great intellectual frameworks versus the difficulty of making large paradigm shifts, not to every little idea and technology versus the difficulty of finding something new to work on earlier than you'd planned.
The one contra to support his thesis is it explains Elon Musks. Being a man who can see where techs could go has immense value as most people can’t do that. That we in fact have a bunch of techs that could flourish if only we had the manager who knew how to put all the pieces together. Also implies the average VC kind of sucks and really just trade off what’s worked in the past and building the next SAAS model or app.
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